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What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the
father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of
that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?
The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in
the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal
differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They
conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their
own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in
the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the
thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young
from home and brought up during many years at a distance will
fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the
same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own
nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they
misplace their respect, honouring everything more than
themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and,
clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may,
and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for
the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their
utter ignoring of the divine.
Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority;
and nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and
perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring
than all else it admires could ever form any notion of either the
nature or the power of God.
A double discipline must be applied if human beings in this pass
are to be reclaimed, and brought back to their origins, lifted
once more towards the Supreme and One and First.
There is the method, which we amply exhibit elsewhere, declaring
the dishonour of the objects which the Soul holds here in honour;
the second teaches or recalls to the soul its race and worth;
this latter is the leading truth, and, clearly brought out, is
the evidence of the other.
It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to
which it is the natural preliminary: the seeker is soul and it
must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which
soul may undertake the search; it must study itself in order to
learn whether it has the faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the
object proposed, whether in fact we ought to seek; for if the
object is alien the search must be futile, while if there is
relationship the solution of our problem is at once desirable and
possible.
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